‘Awesome’: Three Rappers, 61 Cameras and a Garden Party For the Ages

Admittedly, I am not what you would call a Beastie Boys enthusiast. I am not even a casual fan. The depth of my Beasties appreciation runs shallow at best: I like the “Sabotage” video as much as the next guy; “Fight For Your Right” annoys me; the hip-hop clown thing is endearing; and I tend to just take their (many) devotees’ word for it that the trio is rooted in prodigious creative genius. Fine.
I do watch a lot of movies, however, which is why I feel comfortable assessing the Beastie Boys’ Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! as possibly the greatest concert film ever made. A second viewing at last night’s New York premiere confirmed my first impression, and the standing-room-only audience attending the Museum of the Moving Image-hosted event seemed to share at least some of that judgment. Not that it came out when the Beasties themselves–”Mike D” Diamond, Adam “Adrock” Horovitz and Adam “MCA” Yauch–joined the crowd for the requisite post-screening chat.
“How do you stay in such great shape?” a viewer asked.
“As members of a basketball team, we have a very strong work ethic,” Horovitz said.
“We have a workout tape we’re gonna be selling,” Yauch said.
Diamond spoke up. “Actually, the team, I think, has a poor work ethic, and I think everybody needs to talk about that before we get into next season,” he said. “You guys talk about how you want freedom on the court. Show me the stats.”
“Also, we rub ourselves down with monkey piss a lot,” Yauch said.
That the Beastie Boys never actually got around to discussing how good their film is kind of helps define Awesome‘s transcendent appeal. The movie represents the raucous bastard offspring of goofball stunt and technical experiment; only a band that takes its mission as seriously as the Beasties do could conceive a film this determined to not take itself seriously. And only the Beastie Boys–whose interactive relationship with their fans manifests itself in multi-angle DVD’s and do-it-yourself remixes–would count on concertgoers to hold them to their own expressionistic standards.Awesome‘s central gimmick is old news: The band gave 50 fans 50 cameras to record the entirety of its Oct. 9, 2004, concert at Madison Square Garden. “You can rock out, you can do whatever you want,” a producer advises the camerapeople at the beginning of the film. “Just keep shooting. … In 20 years, you’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Awesome; I fuckin’ shot that.’ ” The Beasties combined the crowd footage with that of a small backstage crew, and Yauch went to work.
“There were 61 different angles that we were cutting from,” said Yauch, whose other alias, Nathanial Hörnblowér, claims directing credit. “It was all loaded into Final Cut and stacked and we were cutting from that. It was a pretty crazy job. The way we started out was there were actually theee different editors who went at it, and they had 20 cameras each, and they each did a cut. We were kind of looking it over and picked some parts that worked. We did a cut from that, and Neal (Usatin, supervising editor) and I stated cutting on top of that, and then spent about a year working on it. It was a good starting place, because it’s pretty hard to start with just, like, a blank canvas and start cutting from nothing when you have that much material.”Beastie Boy Adam Yauch with Public Enemy frontman Chuck D at Tuesday’s premiere of Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! (Photo: STV)
In the end, Yauch continued, Awesome comprises 6,632 cuts–an average of one for every 19 frames. It screens like a pixilated light show, drowning in color and kinesis, putting the “ADD” back in “addled.” Meanwhile, the rich, refined sound defies the visuals’ bootleg ethos. As occasionally challenging as this blend is to watch, it makes for revelatory viewing. No band since Talking Heads has preserved (or even established) such visceral identity while relinquishing this much aesthetic control.
But in downplaying posterity for the sake of experience, Awesome sets itself up as the anti-Stop Making Sense, the anti-Last Waltz, the anti-Woodstock, the anti-Gimme Shelter. Depeche Mode 101 trails a handful of fans on their journey to a landmark emotional event in their lives–DM’s 1988 show at the Rose Bowl–but Pennebaker’s film captures a sense of a moment more than any real sense of community. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party evokes moment and community as sort of a hollow auteur wet dream, with no less a force than Michel Gondry doing little more than pointing and shooting Chappelle’s swan song to swagger.
By placing them in the context of a genuine community (and if you have ever been to a sold-out show at the Garden, it is about as communal an atmosphere as 20,000 strangers are likely to find) Awesome de-mystifies its subjects. A man carts his running camera into the bathroom, while another tapes a concessionaire air-guitarring her way through the opening riff of “Sabotage.” One hapless woman turns her device on her relatively idle section, imploring, “Come on, get excited! We’ll be on the DVD.” Boyfriends shout lyrics in girlfriends’ ears, dances mimic each other. The most powerful stage presence, in fact, belongs to the Beasties’ DJ Mix Master Mike, whose showcases contribute the virtuosic complement to Yauch’s crude explosion of style.
That said, for all I lack in Beastie Boys knowledge, their film’s reflection of unhinged New York musical tradition is unmistakeable. “That’s the thing with growing up in New York City,” Diamond said Tuesday night. “I think at the time we grew up, it was like hip-hop was evolving, there were incredible punk rock shows, hip-hop shows, reggae shows. Everything was in New York City. And then at the same time, I think even when we started playing shows ourselves–opening up for Run-DMC and LL Cool J and all these bands on tour–we learned so much from them. Being able to study that and everything, that was like…”
Horovitz gestured into the audience, “For me personally, I don’t know if I’d be doing this if my brother never played me Jimmy Spicer’s Super Rhymes,” he said.
“I can name some shows,” Yauch said. “Like when Funky Four Plus One came Downtown?”
“Oh, yeah,” Diamond said.
“That was definitely a big deal,” Yauch continued. “Slits, PIL, Clash.”
“Gang of Four,” Horovitz said, nodding.
But are the Beastie Boys a continuation of that spirit? That is for their fans to debate, although I should not be so quick to pass the buck–especially considering Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That‘s influence, its magic and my slow assimilation into their ranks. For once, at least for me, the Beastie Boys are a sight and sound to behold.

3 Responses to “‘Awesome’: Three Rappers, 61 Cameras and a Garden Party For the Ages”

The Beastie Boys have been my imaginary best friends ever since I heard their chef-d’oeuvre (imagine the fun they’d have making a song with that title). Still, I went into Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! thinking that its premise—a

“Chad Harbach spent ten years writing his novel. It was his avocation, for which he was paid nothing, with no guarantee he’d ever be paid anything, while he supported himself doing freelance work, for which I don’t think he ever made $30,000 a year. I sold his book for an advance that equated to $65,000 a year—before taxes and commission—for each of the years of work he’d put in. The law schools in this country churn out first-year associates at white-shoe firms that pay them $250,000 a year, when they’re twenty-five years of age, to sit at a desk doing meaningless bullshit to grease the wheels of the corporatocracy, and people get upset about an excellent author getting $65,000 a year? Give me a fucking break.”
~ Book Agent Chris Parris-Lamb On The State Of The Publishing Industry

INTERVIEWERDo you think this anxiety of yours has something to do with being a woman? Do you have to work harder than a male writer, just to create work that isn’t dismissed as being “for women”? Is there a difference between male and female writing?

FERRANTE
I’ll answer with my own story. As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me. That phase ended after a couple of years. At fifteen I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble. But the idea remained—indeed, it grew stronger—that the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them. I devoured books at that age, and there’s no getting around it, my models were masculine. So even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great novels written by men. I didn’t want to write like Madame de La Fayette or Jane Austen or the Brontës—at the time I knew very little about contemporary literature—but like Defoe or Fielding or Flaubert or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or even Hugo. While the models offered by women novelists were few and seemed to me for the most part thin, those of male novelists were numerous and almost always dazzling. That phase lasted a long time, until I was in my early twenties, and it left profound effects.
~ Elena Ferrante, Paris Review Art Of Fiction No. 228